From Above and Below is Sharon Harper's first monograph, published earlier this year by Radius Books. With its lush 11x14" reproductions, where images from seven distinct projects dating 2001 to 2012 are married and juxtaposed, it skirts the world of artists' books, standing as a creative project in its own right.
Harper is an artist and an Associate Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, Cambridge. Her photographs demonstrate a strong understanding of the medium and its early history in particular but, in a work such as Landshift (2012), wholly embrace and explore recent digital technologies and the formal implications of image manipulation. The fluidity found in Harper's methods of recording the world, applied to the subject of her inquiry, yield carefully observed terrestrial and celestial phenomena, lyrically modulated by a process that allows for chance, experimentation, and the failure of the recording instruments themselves.
Sharon Harper was interviewed by Stephanie Cardon
Video shot by Shane Godfrey and Meg Elkinton
Edited by Alexia Prichard. www.closedloopfilms.com
